When the Mad Hatter asks Alice why is a raven like a writing desk, it caused generations to give pause and wonder. The answers were exquisite brain burners from Lewis Carroll’s “Because it can produce a few notes,” to Aldous Huxley’s “Because there is a ‘b’ in both and an ‘n’ in neither.”
Recreational mathematician, (yes there are those who do math for fun) Sam Loyd, came up with “Poe wrote on both” drawing a line between the poet and mathematician, Carroll and the multifaceted Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849).
There was another line between the two — Carroll wrote the wild and wonderful Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the 10-year-old Alice Pleasance Liddell, while the beautifully bewildering, The Raven, echoes Poe’s themes of loss and longing, inspired by the death of his wife, who he married when she was 13 and he was 26. Huxley, incidentally, described Poe’s writing as being too florid, like “wearing a diamond ring on every finger.”
While depictions of Poe in popular culture have leaned towards a tortured genius, the Bostonian was an astute critic, causing Fireside Poet James Russell Lowell’s famous comment of Poe using “prussic acid instead of ink.”
In the recent film adaptation of Louis Bayard’s novel, The Pale Blue Eye (2003), Harry Melling plays Poe as a bright West Point cadet assisting the detective in solving a grisly crime. It seems only right that the father of detective stories be the Watson to Landor’s (Christian Bale) Holmes. Though we all know of the famous residents of 221B Baker’s Street, their creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, paid due respect to Poe with, “Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?”
Wellspring of inspiration
Auguste Dupin who solves The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) and finds The Purloined Letter (1844), set the template for the whodunit, the closed door mystery and the detective itself. Like Doyle comments, each story “is a root from which a whole literature has developed.”
The Murders in the Rue Morgue introduces the amateur detective in Dupin and the Watson prototype in his nameless narrator. At least thankfully the Watsons who followed have a back story and a life even if that jezail bullet seems to move from limb to limb.
The two men share rooms with Dupin dazzling the narrator with his analytical mind. Two women are brutally murdered, while two bags of gold lie untouched in the fourth floor room, which is locked from the inside. Witness claims to have heard two voices — one male, speaking French, and another speaking in a language no one can correctly identify. The solution Dupin arrives at through the process of ratiocination is poignant — the poor confused orang-utan!
Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia bears similarities to The Purloined Letter even though The Woman, Irene Adler, bests Holmes. As much as he is known for his invention of the detective and the short story, Poe’s tales of macabre have inspired countless practitioners of horror from H. P. Lovecraft to the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.
The Pale Blue Eye takes its title from Poe’s unsettling short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, which tells of an unnamed narrator, murdering his benefactor after taking a dislike for their pale blue eye. The murder, dismemberment in a bathtub, and the burial under floorboards, have again inspired many thriller writers.
Madness and murder are Poe’s constants in tales including The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado and The Fall of the House of Usher, though the dead seldom stay silent at least for the perpetuator. There is a theory that Poe was getting back at his literary rivals with the grisly crimes in his stories. It seems like a long stretch — just like Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th Street’ is supposedly aimed at his critics. Dylan also mentions the hungry women at Rue Morgue Avenue who will make a mess out of you.
Detective, check, horror, check, wait there is more to mine from Poe’s oeuvre — cosmology (he thought of the Big Bang theory 80 years ahead) and cryptology (The Gold Bug, inspired U.S. Army cryptographer, William Friedman’s lifelong interest in codes).
Science fiction
In science fiction, Jules Verne was inspired by Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), which flirts with the hollow earth theory, and even wrote a sequel, An Antarctic Mystery, continuing Pym’s adventures after the abrupt ending of Poe’s novel.
Hank Pym of Ant Man which belongs to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a quantum physicist, and probably in another universe descended from Arthur Pym.
Poe’s death of unknown causes, incoherent and wearing someone else’s clothes at the age of 40, is the greatest mystery of all and it is no surprise that it has spawned many theories and narratives including Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow.
From books and graphic novels to television, movies, radio plays and the Edgars, Poe is as constant as the raven and the writing desk and there is no sign of a nevermore anywhere on the horizon.
